Cloud is a strong solution for many companies’ technology needs, but there are often reasons to keep systems on premises. If cloud isn’t the solution to your IT challenges, you need to take a look at hyperconverged infrastructure.
Reasons to Keep IT On Premises
Companies have several motivations for keeping systems on premises.
Perhaps the biggest are security considerations. Although it’s well known by now that cloud is often more secure than corporate data centers, many remain hesitant to trust the security of their data to a facility where resources are shared and they don’t have full control over their systems.
Loss of control is a concern even without talking about security. In a cloud, by definition, you don’t own your resources. You don’t define the policies, and you don’t schedule the system maintenance.
A third concern with cloud is vendor lock-in. Although multi-cloud reduces the dependency on a single vendor, it can be complicated to manage. Every cloud service offered by cloud providers is accessed by a proprietary API. You can’t easily move workloads between your clouds.
Surprisingly, cost, which is often a main driver of the move to cloud, can also prompt you to decide to keep workloads on premises. If you don’t manage your cloud costs effectively, the ongoing charges can add up. With on premises IT, you can reliably know what your spending will be every month.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure for On Premises Workloads
Hyperconverged infrastructure, such as that from Nutanix, allows businesses to get many of the benefits of cloud while keeping their IT infrastructure within the corporate data center and within their control.
The infrastructure is designed to be easily scalable by adding standard nodes. You don’t get the complete capacity-on-demand of true cloud, because you need to purchase the capacity in advance, but it makes extending the infrastructure for growth straightforward with low-cost components. You can also build a private cloud that offers self-service virtual machine creation, giving business departments much of the agility they’d experience in cloud. You get these benefits without the same dependency on public internet required by public cloud.
You can also combine hyperconverged infrastructure with public cloud to create a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment, enabling you to match each workload with the environment that’s the best fit for it. VAST IT Services provides professional services to help you select and implement the right infrastructure for your needs, along with support services and managed services that ensure the solutions you choose work reliably and effectively. Contact us to learn how to incorporate hyperconverged infrastructure into your cloud architecture.
